Here in Bellingham, the Whatcom Museum of History and Art is partnering with the public schools to develop virtual museums which engage students as curators. Visit our site at http://www.bham.wednet/edu If you would like the full text to the article below, please send me an e-mail request or download it from http://www.bham.wednet.edu/muse.htm VIRTUAL MUSEUMS: Full of Sound and Fury Signifying . . . by Jamie McKenzie Introduction The World Wide Web makes possible a powerful new kind of student-centered, constructivist learning by collecting at a single site a phenomenal array of learning resources which can be explored with simple point-and-click skills. Some call these home pages Virtual Libraries. Because of their highly visual character, I prefer the term Virtual Museum. 1. The Virtual Museum Defined A virtual museum is a collection of electronic artifacts and information resources - virtually anything which can be digitized. The collection may include paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, graphs, recordings, video segments, newspaper articles, transcripts of interviews, numerical databases and a host of other items which may be saved on the virtual museum s file server. It may also offer pointers to great resources around the world relevant to the museum s main focus. Most virtual museums. on the Internet today are professionally constructed. One can visit the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Louvre. According to EDUPAGE (1/26/95) by September of 1995 four science museums will offer virtual museums thanks to a project funded by Unisys and the National Science - The Science Learning Network. The program will incorporate "intelligent agents" that can learn a teacher's interest areas and organize and suggest avenues of study. (Investor's Business Daily 1/25/95 A8) 2. Students as Curators of Virtual Museums Within the next year, we will begin to see students in many schools creating their own virtual museums. instead of the fairly standard home pages which are now typical of most school WWW sites. In Bellingham, two schools are already working on virtual museums.. One is called Ellis Island: a virtual museum devoted to heritage and origin. Visitors to the museum will be able to explore their ancestry, regardless of which part of the globe they might have started from. Click on the world map where your own ancestors came from and you will enter a wing of the museum devoted to your heritage. The other museum will focus upon Pacific Rim cultures. (CONTINUED) Jamieson McKenzie, Ed.D. Director of Libraries, Media and Technology Bellingham Public Schools 1306 Dupont Bellingham, WA 98225 [log in to unmask] (206) 676-6525 Bellingham is installing a 1500 station WAN to connect 10,000 students in 18 schools with each other and the Net. Located near the Canadian border, the beautiful San Juan islands and majestic, snow-capped Mt. Baker, Bellingham sits on a beautiful bay and offers sublime sunsets. "The soul is the source of its own unfolding." Heraclitus